What finally tipped the decision, while a few days ago Trion´s stance was more like "we will never do an Evolution again", we will never know. But we also know that Trions rather flexible about changing their minds, if we remember the first merge - for those who weren´t around, it was the same - one day "Never", next day "Merge incoming".

Don´t get me wrong. I think this is a very good decision, that hopefully will breathe new life into the evolved servers.
I don´t wish for Archeage to die even if i may not stick with it after the Evolution.

While my personal experience with the first merge is a story of technical failure on Trion´s side, they seemed to have finally learned an plan to stagger the launch of the evolved servers - one server at a time.

Thumbs up on Trion for finally realizing that it´s time and the seemingly detailed planning.

Maybe it was that 52.500 packs in EU done by most likely not more than 100-150 real accounts each day (on each of the 8 main Cluster servers) that gave them the idea, that server populations are indeed no longer healthy.

Astonishingly, Celestrata is giving (most of the time) straight and useful answers in the official Q&A thread: